What If Life Did Not Originate on Earth?

Re:What If Life Did Not Originate on Earth? by marcosdumay on Wednesday July 10, 2019 @12:31AM (#20399158)

> So this timing is either very unlikely, or biogenesis has a high probability of happening, or the initial life got seeded from off planet

Or life can only appear on young planets (maybe while it's hot), or some astronomical event triggered it (Moon?), or there are enough hard steps on the path to intelligence that it couldn't appear if life took too long to form. It's a good question anyway.

> So that means that biogenesis happened only once.

Life has repeatedly shown a tendency of consuming all available raw matter and populating every niche. Biogenesis happening only once is completely non-surprising.

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Re:What If Life Did Not Originate on Earth? by mar77i on Wednesday July 10, 2019 @10:21AM (#20402184)

There is a rather intriguing BBC documentary "Do we really need the moon?" about the topic on YouTube. The argument being made was that the moon propelled the chemical clockworks to develop life in a time when the moon was much closer, hence its tidal forces much stronger. To me that would mean that, Mars has, for a lack of such history, a weaker case for being dubbed the origin of life, unless research came across really strong evidence. Like, it would have to be from a time before Earth cooled down enough to even remotely harbor life.

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